Yup! Here’s a helpful link in case you feel like spreading the joy.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/install-use-microsoft-defender-linux/

Microsoft Defender.

I convinced my work to let me use linux on their laptop. They sent me instructions for setup. One of them was to install Microsoft Defender, had a link to the Ubuntu package and everything. Blew my mind.

Does your pc’s mobo have 2 m.2 slots? If so, that’s a great solution. If you do decide to stick with linux, that gives you two hdds. If not, you might want to consider buying a m.2 ssd to usb enclosure too. You can use it to transfer files you want to keep or for ventoy or backups.

DACs are great, agreed. However try telling that to the guy next door. The reason ethernet got to be so popular was because of how familiar it was and similar it us to telephone wire. There were several other competing standards befofe ethernet won.

10GbE cards and switches help regular folk upgrade without needing to learn about DACs.

Right?! Most affordable 10G switches are SFP+ which requires a lot more research to make sure you get the right modules and cabling.

Run:

df -h

in the terminal and find out.

Not NEW, but, check out local auctions. Local universities and govt offices are frequently selling lots of newish laptops (5ish yrs old) for $10-$50 apiece.

That’s why we have mice copy/paste bindings on most systems too. Highlighting text auto copies, and scroll wheel click pastes. Not all do this, but many do and have for a while.

Great, I recommend having two Adguard Home instances.

Yep, if you have somewhere to put a docker container or VM you can have redundancy.

Right, I never said two raspberry pis, I meant two instances. Like one pi and a container run elsewhere.

Right, I didn’t have any issues running it on a pi for years too. The problems came when I started messing with things. So, really my advice is to help save people from ideas like mine.

I decided one day to take a bunch of old laptops and create a proxmox cluster out of them. It worked great, but I didn’t have a use for them, I was just playing. So, I decided to retire the pi and put the pihole on the cluster. HA for the win!

I did that and came woke up a few days later to my family complaining that they had no internet. I found the pihole container on a different node and it wouldn’t start. Turns out with proxmox you need separate storage for HA to work. I had assumed that it would be similar to jboss clustering which I’m familiar with, and the container would be on all the nodes and only one actice at a time, with some syncing between nodes. Nope.

What’s worse is the container refused to move back to the origional node AND wouldn’t start. The pi was stored away at this point so I figured it would be easier to just create a new container, but duh, no internet. Turn off dns settings on the router, bam have internet.

Eventually set up the old pi again, and it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong with proxmox. But while I was figuring it out it was nice to have the backup.

Now I always have two running on different hardware, just in case.

I recommend having two. Otherwise your home internet goes down everytime you update or reboot or it crashes.

Windows 10 Home

Just checked my wife’s laptop. Local account, secure boot off, windows 10. It had a message telling me to setup a microsoft account to ‘finish encrypting the device’. I clicked turn off, and it’s currently decrypting the hard drive. Blech.

Or to hang on a home server rack displaying dashboards.

Garuda - because like endeavor it’s arch for lazy people, plus I got sold on the gaming edition by how much I like the theme and the latest drivers. But that’s just what got me to try it, what sold me on it is when I had a vm of it that ran out of hdd space mid kernel update. I shut it down to expand the drive, booted it back up and no kernels present. Fiddling around in grub in a panic made me realize snappertools auto snapshots btrfs before updating. I think only once in my life (out of dozens of tries) has Microsoft’s restorepoints actually worked for me. Booting to the snapshot was effortless, clicking through to recover to that snapshot was a breeze. I rebooted again just to make sure it was working and it did. Re-updated and I was back in action.

That experience made me love garuda. I highly recommend snappertools+btrfs from now on and use it whenever I can. Yes, preventative tools and warnings would have stopped it from happening, but you can’t stop everything, and it’s a comfort to have.

Ahhhh have you double checked to make sure your GPU will fit in your case? I see you went micro atx for case and mobo, but gpus nowadays be chonky. It should fit, but I’ve seen new builds where the gpu didn’t fit in a normal atx case due to layout and mobo positioning.

I have a similar build, but everything is a generation behind. I really like Garuda Linux. Arch keeps the latest drivers comin’ and It’s a nice easy install. Btrfs+snappertools come setup by default, and it’s saved my bacon a few times. Really nice to be able to have grub boot to a snapshot and just work. And the snapshots are auto created everytime pacman is run.